The present invention relates generally to telephonic switching systems for servicing telephone calls and, more particularly, to a telephonic switching system, telephonic switch and method for servicing telephone calls wherein the telephone calls are placed in virtual memory spaces and serviced by virtual agents associated with the virtual memory spaces.
Telephonic switching systems incorporating telephonic switches are increasingly being used by businesses to automatically service customer telephone calls. One common type of telephonic switch is an automatic call distributor (ACD) which generally includes a multiport switch controlled by a central processing unit to interconnect customers and agents. An example of one such ACD is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 5,140,611 issued to Jones et al. on Aug. 18, 1992, entitled "Pulse Width Modulated Self-Clocking and Self-Synchronizing Data Transmission and Method for a Telephonic Communication Network Switching System", the disclosure of which is hereby incorporated by reference.
Various resources in the telephonic switching system may service the telephone calls. Voice response units (VRU), message recorders and, of course, human agents are just some of the resources which service the telephone calls. Since these resources are necessarily limited in number, the system is oftentimes unable to service all of the received telephone calls. In prior systems, the excess telephone calls were placed in queue awaiting the proper resource.
Unfortunately, placing the telephone calls in queue has significant drawbacks. A telephone call in queue is considered by the ACD as being "unanswered" and, therefore, the call processing functions available are limited. For example, an "unanswered" telephone call may not be transferred. In addition, dynamic announcements may not be played to the telephone call in queue. Further, real time displays relating to the telephone call are available only for "answered" telephone calls.
Accordingly, there is a need in the art for a telephonic switching system, telephonic switch and method for servicing telephone calls wherein telephone calls are placed in virtual memory spaces, wherein the telephone calls are serviced by virtual agents in the virual memory spaces, wherein each telephone call is considered answered when placed in a virtual memory space, wherein a virtual memory space is provided for each telephone call receivable by the telephonic switch, and wherein a virtual agent is provided for each virtual memory space.